As the Internet increased in popularity, parents became worried about the content of the websites that their children were accessing. Today, the increasing use of mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, pagers, and similar devices) have only further enhanced this and similar apprehensions of parents. Because many mobile devices can provide easy access to an array of applications from almost any location at any time, it has become increasingly difficult for parents to manage and monitor the mobile data, content, access, and usage of their children on their mobile devices. For example, many mobile devices allow users to access numerous applications such as voice (e.g., phone and voicemail), messaging (e.g., SMS/MMS), Internet, gaming, music, and video. Typically, the access to these applications can be easily obtained with the touch of a button. Moreover, each member of a household might have more than one mobile device, which would even further complicate the situation of managing and controlling children's use of their mobile devices.
In the past few years, many efforts have been made to address customers' needs in using mobile devices, but none provides a full solution for the above-stated problem. For example, some service providers offer customers “pay-as-you-go” plans to control use of their mobile devices, where if a customer's prepaid balance falls below a certain threshold, the service provider directs the subscriber to purchase additional time. However, such “pay-as-you-go” plans have limited applicability in the context of prepaid services. Another example is for service providers to provide customers or subscribers with mobile devices, e.g., cell phones, that were made with configurable restrictions, pursuant to which the customers or subscribers can program and personalize the devices. For instance, a parent is able to login to a child's phone to apply usage and phone number restrictions on that particular phone. This solution, again, is restrictive because it requires manual configuration of each of the pre-selected types of mobile devices. In addition, like many other efforts, this solution fails to address customers' concerns on the content accessible from the mobile devices.
In light of the above, there exists a need to provide customers, such as parents, with an improved comprehensive method and system for managing and monitoring the mobile data, content, access, and usage of their own or their affiliates' mobile devices.